Desiree Dudley

Desiree cultivates breakthrough startups and non-profit initiatives
primarily in Cambridge-Boston and Silicon Valley. Organizations she's
worked with in various roles - from pipette monkey and phone-answerer
to ops hustler, grant writer, connection-builder, and program director
- include MIT, Emerald Therapeutics, SkyPhrase, ONE-Nano, InvivoKines,
Foresight Nanotech Institute, SENS Research Foundation, Stanford
University, Innovations Academy, and A-Life Medical. As MIT's Director
of Neurotechnology Partnerships, Desiree is currently focused on
crafting new strategies and alliances to catalyze the ground-truthing
of biology, medicine, and brain technologies with Ed Boyden's
Synthetic Neurobiology group.
Desiree gets professional inspiration from developing, debugging, and
precisely leveraging true-value integrations with teams of world-class
scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, financiers, and promising young
students to actualize the full potential in emerging technologies -
and learning as much as she can along the way. At NewSpace, NASA-Ames,
CNBC, AP Wire, TEDx, BIL, and MIT's Communicating Science forums,
Desiree has occasionally expounded on what it takes to successfully
identify, communicate, and ultimately turn obstacles into milestones
for even the most complex and ambitious of technical aspirations; at
MIT, she's been a co-instructor for the Center for Neurobiological
Engineering's Neurotechnology In Action course, as well as the Media
Lab's Revolutionary Ventures: How To Invent and Deploy Transformative
Technologies. In her spare time, she's written a crazy-short foreword
to Nanotech For Dummies, served as a mentor for The Thiel Foundation,
won a San Diego Mensa No Limit Hold 'Em Poker tourney, and survived
five Tough Mudders.